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Thus we may not look for the Intellectual objects [the Ideas]
outside of the Intellectual-Principle, treating them as
impressions of reality upon it: we cannot strip it of truth and
so make its objects unknowable and non-existent and in the end
annul the Intellectual-Principle itself. We must provide for
knowledge and for truth; we must secure reality; being must
become knowable essentially and not merely in that knowledge of
quality which could give us a mere image or vestige of the
reality in lieu of possession, intimate association, absorption.
The only way to this is to leave nothing out side of the
veritable Intellectual-Principle which thus has knowledge in the
true knowing [that of identification with the object], cannot
forget, need not go wandering in search. At once truth is there,
this is the seat of the authentic Existents, it becomes living
and intellective: these are the essentials of that most lofty
Principle; and, failing them, where is its worth, its grandeur?
Only thus [by this inherence of the Ideas] is it dispensed from
demonstration and from acts of faith in the truth of its
knowledge: it is its entire self, self-perspicuous: it knows a
prior by recognising its own source; it knows a sequent to that
prior by its self-identity; of the reality of this sequent, of
the fact that it is present and has authentic existence, no outer
entity can bring it surer conviction.
Thus veritable truth is not accordance with an external; it is
self-accordance; it affirms and is nothing other than itself and
is nothing other; it is at once existence and self-affirmation.
What external, then, can call it to the question, and from what
source of truth could the refutation be brought? Any counter
affirmation [of truth] must fall into identity with the truth
which first uttered itself; brought forward as new, it has to
appear before the Principle which made the earlier statement and
to show itself identical with that: for there is no finding
anything truer than the true.
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